Things from your childhood that feel like ancient history now

[Echobelly]

• 3 TV channels
• Everything shut on Sunday (and local shops often shut Wednesday afternoons for some reason?)
• 1/2 pennies
• Only asking 'What does your dad do?'
• A lot of people having black and white tellies
• Holiday brochures

These are some of the things that I think will seem inexplicable to my kids!

TwoZeroTwoZero. You have reminded me -

Wheeling the big telly into class when it was your forms turn.
Watching Chocky? Scary and unsuitable thing about an alien boy.
And Zig Zag, a history thing featuring a song that has burned the date if the battle of Hastings into my mind until the day I die.

School boards were slate and we used chalk to write on them, going outside to pound the erasers clean against the wall

Riding around in cars with lap belts....baby up front being held in arms or in a basket on the floor.

Medicated toilet paper that came in waxy square sheets...not the soft stuff on a roll we have today.

Not being allowed to wear jeans or trainers, because only “wrong” sort of girls wore those.

Forced to take cooking and sewing class in school while boys were forced to take wood and metal working class

Rotary dial phones.

Typing class on typewriters!

Card catalogs in libraries.

@GroggyLegs - I bought my Commodore 64 cassettes from WHSmith. I can’t imagine them selling anything remotely as thrilling these days! I had paperboy too, and something called New Zealand Story, which was particularly exciting as it consisted of THREE separate games in one box. The possibilities felt endless.

Toy sweetie cigarettes

Birthday parties where the girls (no boys invited usually) wore long dresses, or sometimes bridesmaids dresses. Parties were always at home, not at indoor play areas or whatever like now. It was games of pass the parcel, pin the tail on the donkey, musical statues etc, with a birthday tea of sandwiches, crisps, and sausage rolls. No party bags but a balloon and a slice of cake in a napkin to take home.

Pound notes
Once a week baths
No house phones, had to go to the phone box
Catalogue

Taping the top 40 from the radio and getting annoyed when the presenter sang along with the last few bars
Amstrad computers that saved to cassettes
Big floppy discs and then small floppy discs
Acorn computers!
Being asked "what do you want all that memory for" when building my uni computer with a whole 256mb of ram
Rollerskating downhill with bamboo poles as "skis" - I am amazed I'm still alive
Heading out with friends on our bikes with a packed lunch with no mobiles, all day, aged probably 10 or 11
As a teen having to phone friends/boys from the landline and have a conversation in the hall with because the phone was attached to the socket
Arranging to meet in town at a certain time and just - meeting there at the arranged time, without phones or texting!
Accidentally running up a £150 bill on my mum's first work mobile texting my bestie on her mum's work mobile...

Teletext - we booked all our holidays through teletext, it would take ages if you missed a page.

And yes to rotary dial phones - listening as it clicked through the numbers.

@Byllis- did you have any of the games which were mainly text " you are in a forest, you can see an elf in the distance" and you would type in the instructions? "Speak to elf"?

I always remember one occasion being a rebel and typing "shit" - the game told me off & made me die

Watching "Schools and Colleges" on weekday mornings if I was ever off school, I'll.
Jumping on and off a moving double decker bus before they had doors

Little glass bottles of milk in a crate ready for drinking at playtime.

nylons bedding AND nightie. The static held you in place in the bed and caused little blue flashes and crackles if you managed to pull yourself free. I thought it was amazing.

I remember putting my nylon nightie over the fireguard of the open fire to warm it up and it melted and stuck to the guard!

Gosh, where do I start! When I was a child, suicide was illegal, and if you survived the attempt you could be prosecuted.
Abortion was illegal.
Being gay was illegal.
Women were paid less than men for the same job and could be sacked if pregnant.
Women needed to get a male guarantor for a loan or mortgage.
The contraceptive pill was not available on the NHS - you had to pay for a private prescription.
Until I was three, you couldn’t directly dial people in different cities on your phone, you had to be connected by an operator.
My grandparents still had an outside toilet, and my sister’s schoolfriend (who lived next to Heathrow airport) had no electricity- her house was lit by gas lamps.
We had no heating in the bedrooms and thick ice formed on the inside of the windows in winter.
We only had hot water for baths once a week.
The washing was done by hand in a gas fired copper, and fed through a mangle to squeeze the water out, before pegging on a line. My DC were in fits when they saw our old wooden tongs (for lifting the clothes out of the hot water) - in a museum!
There were no credit cards. If you wanted something you saved up for it.
Food was very boring - there were no supermarkets and no takeaways, apart from the chip shop, in my town. It was standard plain British meat and two veg, every day.
Our house was bomb damaged in WW2, so we had cracks in the walls and warped window frames, with subsequent draughts.
Looking back, it does seem like the dark ages, but as it was over 60 years ago, not surprising!

Outside toilets at school.

Constant stream of public service adverts warning us about the danger of quicksand, swimming in rivers and the like.

Taking glass bottles back to the shop.

Rag and bone man, coal man, and the man who came round to sharpen knives.

@Babdoc
We had no heating in the bedrooms and thick ice formed on the inside of the windows in winter.

Ah, I had that too. I remember looking at all the patterns the ice would make on the glass. Going to bed fully clothed, and a wool hat. We children fought over who would get the cat to keep their feet warm.

Outside toilets in infant school and tracing paper loo roll;
Candy stripe sheets and candlewick or satin covers;
Roast dinner on Sunday with sandwiches, salad, cakes, biscuits for tea;
Bomdie houses and ollers (old WW2 bomb sites, CPO empty or flattened buildings) which we played in!
Whole areas being knocked down (see above) and communities split up and sent out to estates in new towns miles away;
10 people to a car with no seatbelts;
Teachers copying textbooks onto the blackboard and us copying the blackboard into exercise books. No explaining or interaction;
Pubs closing at 3pm and opening back up at 7pm;
A portion of chips and a bottle of coke to share was a huge treat.

Not being able to use the internet because your mum was on the phone

Not being able to use the internet - because it hadn't been invented yet!
(except for a very primitive version for the US military)

Milkmen who delivered to every house, always in pint bottles and on a milk float rather than in a van.

Corona pop, with the sugary residue around the bottle neck - where you paid a deposit on the bottles that you got back (or put towards another bottle) at the corner shop.

Individual penny chews that actually cost a penny each - or two ha'pennies!

Sending an SAE in the post for information about something - and postal orders!

x-posted with DearPrudence on the returnable pop bottles.

I see a few people here mention the Sinclair Zx and it brings a question to mind...

Every time I hear the word "magenta" I think of some old computer system, and I think it's the Zx.

Does anyone remember this word in relation to the Sinclair Zx? (Or maybe I'm losing the plot 😂)

This noise:

Dialling 1471

Snake

Teletext & ceefax

Yes to boring Sundays

Proper alarm clocks

Teachers writing with chalk on those roller blackboards, and being chosen to go up and clean it when it ran out

No seat belts in cars. Me and my brothers and sisters used to kneel up on the back seat with our arms folded on the bumpy/bendy roads. First to crack heads was the loser 🤣

Using phone boxes

Renting the TV

Bags of penny, and half pence sweets

Cadbury chocolate that was delicious

Skodas that were truly rubbish cars - as opposed to modern Skodas which are among the best and most reliable cars you can buy.

Also Ladas - but they were no longer for this world.

My great grandma having an outside toilet , must have been 1979/80? I was very little and the whole street of terraces was demolished a few years later .

Milk in small bottles with a green straw at school break time (warm in summer 🤮)
BBC testcard
Children’s TV for a couple of hours after school
Only being allowed to use the phone after 6pm
Strikes....power cuts.... trying to find a torch and candles in the dark
Kids being smacked at school
Elvis dying
Yorkshire Ripper on the news
Holidays in caravans
The blue salt sachet in crisp packets
My grandma’s apple pie with the china implement in the middle of the pie that stopped the pastry lid from collapsing
Summer of 1976.....queuing at a standpipe
Collecting Heinz labels for Blue Peter appeals

Guess the decade!!